Winner: Rouven Essig

Rouven Essig of East Setauket recently received a $50,000 two-year Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation based on his "distinguished performance and potential to make substantial contributions to physics," the organization said. Essig is an assistant professor at Stony Brook University's C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Department of Physics and Astronomy, where he researches the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles in journals including the Journal of High Energy Physics and Physical Review D.